Trystan, thanks, I’ve had three solid years of use of Emoncms without paying a penny apart from the kit I’ve bought. I’d be quite happy to pay to continue service. Living a strange life across two countries, it’s great to have one database for both houses.
I’m another one who has created feeds “just for interest” so it will certainly make me do a tidy-up.
The pay-for-service option made me think of something else. I currently subscribe to a webcam host provider and a MQTT broker service, basic service only on both. Have you considered extending the service to cover such options? I have no idea of the scale or economics of it, but thought I’d raise the point.
Thankyou @derekb much appreciated. I see emoncms.org as sticking to the time-series storage and visualisation primary focus but then extended with apps and other tools that help make sense of that data. We would definitely like to add a MQTT broker to give the option to use MQTT to post data to emoncms.org, thats on our list of things to add.
The introduction of billing on emoncms.org brings with it some interesting questions about monitoring system design (or IOT in a wider sense) which I think it would be good to discuss openly. We don’t want to push people to use and pay for emoncms.org where it’s not suitable, we only want people to use it if it is valuable. There are I think advantages and disadvantages to both remote and local data storage and visualisation and it’s likely a matter of choosing the right tool for the application, or a combination of both. Luckily there are many options with emoncms: emonpi/emonbase, diy local, self hosted remote, emoncms.org.
I started a dedicated thread on this topic here: Forum post: Emoncms local vs remote, thought I better link it in here so that it doesn’t get lost.
I came to emoncms in December 2016 after smart energy groups implemented a pricing strategy. I think requiring people to pay for stuff is fine. I really liked smart energy groups, but I found the pricing strategy somewhat complicated and it seemed to be more expensive than it was worth to me. You can see their prices here: https://smartenergygroups.com/pricing
It appears to be higher than what you are proposing and more complicated with different prices based on frequency of updates and calculations or not. It also is a billed service not like a cell phone top up plan.
I really didn’t want to use emoncms.org (because it felt a little wrong as I hadn’t bought any hardware, thought that changed last year), but I was having difficulty getting it to work locally. I eventually figured out how to make it work there but never got around to making it work locally. I guess now, I will have to decide how much access is worth and if I want to run it locally or use something else. I am also looking at Grafana and Influx, since I have a lot of sensors on lots of things and it might be best if I self host.
There was a post back in January about Emoncms.org email verification but no mention of it being compulsory or that users would get locked out.
I have been involved with setting up many accounts for third parties and have a couple of my own (test and personal). I have recently accessed most of the ones that I still have control of to count the feeds, check the costs and get the feed size on disk etc to generally evaluate the move or the costs etc.
The only date mentioned thus far is July 1st 2018 and elsewhere it has been said that accounts will not “just get terminated” during the transition, so I have been waiting for the sync module to be completed so that I could backup all the data from the emoncms.org servers (incl input processing and dashboards etc) and I have just tried to log in to check something unrelated and found I could not get in, checked all the other accounts I could think of and I’m locked out of all of them.
I have “resend verification” on every single account and not received a single email, I’ve checked the spam and junk folders but nothing has come through.
Do I now need to email and get each one unlocked individually? I know most, if not all of them have a valid email although it will not have been verified.
Interestingly I have also only ever received one single email to tell me that billing was coming and that was to an email address I rarely use so I think there is an issue with the emoncms.org outgoing emails.
Why wasn’t this warned about here on the forum ahead of it being implemented ???
Hello @pb66, apologies I thought it was a small change, email verification is important and we really should have had this policy of requiring email verification much earlier, I had a couple of emails from users who did not recall creating an account which was a little concerning, without email verification you can create an account with anyone’s email address. I can easily change this back for a period of time if its a real problem. I will look into the issue with your account now.
I totally agree, I have always been surprised by the lack of verification and was pleased to see you start to implement it. I expected mandatory verification to come at some point. My problem is that there was no warning, indication or even a hint that this was going to happen right now and have such a severe consequence, I’m not psychic! All I expected was some heads up.
I did eventually get a flurry of verification emails they have no indication of what account there relate to even after clicking them and no indication of the expiry time on the link, so I found myself hastily and blindly clicking all the links in the emails, I got a couple of “Invalid email or verification key” messages but mainly they were successful. I do not yet now which accounts I do or do not have access to until I try them all again.
I think that is for the best. Remove the “lockout” and make a proper announcement so that users can validate their emails or change email accounts or simply back up thier data or close thier accounts ahead of being locked out or charged.
Some users may be using a different email account now. One of the accounts I am due to move for a 3rd party has an email set up to an employee that left nearly a year ago, he was supposed to manage the account but left, I have been keeping an eye on it since and just didn’t bother changing the email since the account will be closed before billing starts.
I understand you cannot communicate with those users that fudged an email address, but if their intention was less than honest, that’s their problem. But there is no reason you couldn’t blanket email every email address on the emoncms server or even have just included a line in the email that has gone out about charging. Those of us that have multiple concerns would have hopefully got at least one email. You could announce it here on the forum, you even have email lists for the shop and for the forum, there’s twitter and there is dozens of github repos that have “followers” you could raise an issue to alert. There really is no reason we did not know about this ahead of time.
The only reason those accounts are still active is because I was waiting for the sync module, can you share some sort of timeline? Will that be complete before charging starts? Surely the “order of events” should be to give us the completed tool to move/backup the data before charging begins or locking us out the accounts without warning.
My personal account verified no problem a day or two after the very first announcement about email verification back in January. I have no doubt the verification will work, even if there is an hour or so delay.
I only have an issue with this being rolled out without warning to accounts I wasn’t bothering to update the email addresses for since they were going to be closed and there was no indication the verification was mandatory or that lockout would occur.
That wasn’t a problem for me, but in your situation, I can see the nightmare it’s created. It’s a pity the email didn’t include the user name - or even a part of it. I can’t see a security issue there.
I have disabled mandatory email verification on login for now, and will send an automated email to accounts that have not yet been verified to give until 1st of June to verify account email address before the mandatory email verification is required again.
It would be very useful to be able to just “off load” the data asap for those accounts that we know are going, you don’t want everyone using the sync module to download years of data in the closing days before “lockout” or billing starts. That will undoubtedly increase the load on the server and may cause issues for those users that intend to stay for the paid for service.
Im worried that the use of the term lockout may be misunderstood. To be clear we will not be locking anyone out of their accounts or stopping access to account data prior to accounts being archived which will happen 3 months after an account stays in negative balance. After this point account data will be kept for another 6-12 months before being deleted permanently. An email notification will be given at each stage.
It will still be possible to export data from accounts up to the point where the account is archived.
So in the case of an account that stays in negative balance after 1st of July 2018, it will still be possible to access that account and export data all the way up to 1st of October 2018.
The mandatory email verification is only an impediment to accessing data in an account until the account email address is verified. Posting data continues and no data is deleted. In the event that the email is incorrect or that the account verification emails dont get through for any reason, just send a quick email to our support email at [email protected] and we can help out.
For those wanting to download their data with the sync module, its already possible to download feed data as described above, if anyone wishes to start the process of copying accounts by downloading feed data first its possible to do that now. The sync module can be used to download data written since the last download as well, it tells you how many datapoints behind the remote server your local copy is.
@TrystanLea Is it possible get the dashboard dump from my account?
The dashboard building is the most work.
so it’s small dump and for me easy integrade into my emoncms local server.
will that functionality be available ahead of the billing start date (with time to do the sync’s)? or if that’s unlikely should we just use the usefulscripts/backup (not the back up module) instead?
I’ve had a look at the sync module code, I haven’t tried it yet, but it seems to only do phpfina, is that a work in progress or will it not be doing all feeds?
What are the differences/benefits of using one method over another? It seems the usefulscripts/backup will sync if run again at a later date and it accommodates all feed type, inputs and processing, but not dashboards.
From what I can see the sync moduleallows you to pick and choose feeds but only does phpfina and doesn’t do any inputs/processing/dashboards as yet. However it does need the whole emonpi repo installed just to trigger the sync, would it not be simpler to also have a commandline alternative rather than messing around with cron etc? Like the post-process module?
Thanks @pb66@GuidoSo, I will update soon on the sync module and copying dashboards. @Gwil and I have been working on the link between the OpenEnergyMonitor Shop and emoncms.org over the last week , so that its possible to access emoncms credit based on past order spend. We are almost there.
As a sidenote, will the delete account and mandatory email confirmation filter back to the main emoncms repo?
We see many emonPi users ask if they can reset emoncms after experimenting with processes etc and I know I could make use of the delete account button in both my test and live servers to either delete old test accounts or to remove dormant projects. The mandatory email conf should be a settings option I think, we do not want to force emonpi users to have to set up email to confirm their own accounts, nor would I want to have to confirm emails on a quick test account, but I do see the need for it on a live server.
